How Do I Break Into a New Niche?

We’ve all been there – when you start a new business in a new niche, you simply don’t have the brand recognition or credibility. Most times you’ll find yourselves competing against marketers who’ve been long established in the niche.

So the question is, how do you break into an entirely new niche when you’re an outsider?

Take a look at these best practices…

Align Yourself With Credible Others

This is one of the quickest and most powerful ways to break into any niche. What you need to do is partner with the reputable people in your niche. In turn, you’ll be able to borrow their credibility. Your name will be associated with their names. And prospects will assume that you’re in the same tier as these big names.

For example, imagine if you were penning a book on sprinting, and you got Olympic medalist Usain Bolt to be a co-author.

What would happen?

That’s right, you’d have instant credibility on the topic, simply because you have one of the world’s foremost experts as the co-author.

So maybe you won’t get an Olympian to work with you on a project. However, there are dozens if not hundreds of “big names” in your niche with whom you could align yourself. And there are plenty of ways to align yourself, including:

Creating a lead magnet together.

Doing a webinar together.

Creating a paid product together.

Co-endorsing one another on your websites, newsletters and social media pages.

Swapping content for your blogs, newsletters and social media pages.

Promoting each others’ products directly.

And so on.

What’s more, in some cases you don’t even need to work with someone who’s known in the niche. Instead, all you have to do is work with someone with perceived authority on the topic. For example:

Work with an investment banker on a product about retirement investments.

Do a fitness webinar with a personal trainer.

Interview a doctor or nurse about common health conditions, such as asthma, chronic headaches, or back pain.

So the point is, start developing relationships with the big names in your new market. And then seek out to do joint ventures with these influential others, as doing so will instantly build your credibility.

Develop a USP

Another way to stand out in a crowded niche is to develop your unique selling proposition (USP). This is a succinct statement that tells others why your business is different and better than the competitors.

Your USP needs to be based on a factor that is important to your target market. Examples include:

The product is created in an unique way. An example is Folger’s Coffee whose USP is “mountain grown.” (Never mind that most coffee is mountain grown – Folger’s claimed it as their USP first.)

The product comes with a strong guarantee. E.G., pizza delivery that comes in “30 minutes or it’s free.”

Check out your competition to see how they’ve positioned yourself. Do some research to find out what’s important to your prospects and customer. Then develop a unique selling proposition that separates you from your competition based on a factor that’s important to your market.

Establish Yourself As An Expert

Finally, another best practice when you’re looking to establish yourself quickly in a niche is to establish yourself as an expert or authority. Aligning yourself with other experts or authorities is one way to do it. Here are two more:

Blanket your niche with content. Create a blog and a newsletter. Share content on social media. Upload videos to YouTube. Do guest blogging to distribute your content. Submit content to publishers.

Point is, if people who are looking for information keep running into your name, they’re going to start viewing you as an expert.

Publish a print book. It’s great if you can get extra authority by having a big publishing house publish it. If you can’t, not problem. Instead, you can self publish this using a platform like Amazon’s CreateSpace.com. Point is, a lot of people still associate physical book authors as experts, so just selling a physical book on your site will boost your authority.

Parting Thoughts

So there you have three good ways and best practices for breaking into a new niche.